11/10/15 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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Man, I bet if I told you guys that the New York Times published an article by Philip Giraldi about the deep state that you would say, Nuh-uh.
Really?
Or something like that.
That's what I said when Eric Garris let me know.
And yet I already knew that they had published an article by someone about an article that Phil had written in the American Conservative.
And I thought, that's pretty good for the New York Times.
But now, no, really, look.
At NYtimes.com, America's establishment has embraced deep states.
It's Phil Giraldi, former CIA and DIA officer, executive director of the Council for the National Interest, regular writer for UNZ.com and the American Conservative magazine.
And I guess I probably shouldn't ask you how you got this article in the New York Times, Phil.
Welcome back to the show.
Well, actually, they approached me.
One of their editors contacted me through Ron Anz and asked if I would do a piece on the deep state for them.
And I was in Italy at the time, actually, and I had to take a work break.
And I wrote the piece for them.
And sure enough, it appeared about 10 days later.
Amazing.
And, hey, it's a good one, too.
Now, so what exactly is a deep state?
Because if such a thing exists, I'm sure it only exists somewhere far away from here.
But I don't know.
Tell them.
Well, I mean, deep state is essentially the secret state.
You know, you can call it anything you want.
Deep state is a popular name for it because it comes from the Turkish originally, where Turkey has long had a widely recognized deep state, a secret state, which works behind the scenes.
Essentially to do things when it perceives that the government, the elected government, has gone too far.
And this is, of course, from the perspective of the national security state, from the military, and that kind of thing.
So it's definitely a perspective issue.
And my article basically points out that for the United States to look the other way when countries like Turkey and Egypt, I cited, are engaging in deep state, it essentially is damaging to democratic institutions.
And, of course, the implication is that we have a deep state also in the United States, which is more comfortable with the deep states in places like Egypt and Turkey because it gives us, quote, stability.
Well, and, you know, especially in Egypt, I mean, that seems to me such a special case where you really had virtually all of the population of the whole damn country wanted a revolution, wanted rid of Mubarak, wanted to rein in the military state and have elections.
And they had some.
The conservative party won.
And then the whole damn thing was canceled after a year and a half with, you know, as you reported on this show and in print back before it even happened, as it was happening with Saudi and American backing.
They were even, as you described it, basically bribing renter mobs, Iran 53 style, to try to destabilize the capital city of Cairo there in order to set the stage for the coup, the military coup and counter revolution.
And it seems like that's the if there's one country where the Americans maybe even could have convinced the military to go ahead and let this play out a little bit and have a little bit less role for them in domestic affairs and more role for an actual elected government, even if it includes the Muslim Brotherhood, that maybe they could have done that.
And yet they're in such a hurry to side with this deep state against the people of Egypt.
And all they've done is so dissension and and, you know, justify every prediction that Ayman al-Zawahiri ever made about how America would ever treat democracy if it ever really came to Egypt, you know?
Yeah, that's exactly the case.
And also, of course, we're seeing now the blowback from this, which is which is essentially that by doing this sort of thing, by supporting basically one kind of faction within a very complex society, you're basically creating potential for terrorism, which we're seeing in Egypt, bringing down an airplane.
We're creating a situation where democracy, the possibility of Egypt becoming a functional democracy probably has been pushed back for 20 years.
Yeah.
And and now well into that, too, I guess to conservatives listening, they might think I'm completely crazy.
But am I right that really the Muslim Brotherhood ain't too much further to the right than the Republicans and that they're a far cry from a movement like Al-Qaeda of a bunch of radical, basically Islamist, Leninist crazies?
Well, the problem with with them from the perspective of Saudi Arabia, the United States, is the fact that they essentially are a group that is critical, highly critical of the established regimes, regimes in the in the Arab world.
And so actually, Saudi Arabia is terrified of that kind of thing.
They don't they don't want one man, one vote or one woman, one vote, that's for sure.
And so this is why they intervened or pushed back on this situation.
So that's why they're seen as a threat, because they want basically more democracy.
And we got onto the bandwagon because we perceived wrongly that this would be a more stable or manageable situation from the point of view of the interests of the United States and, of course, Israel.
And so we got into it.
And these, of course, my point being that these, of course, are wrong judgments.
The fact is that Israel, that Egypt initially would have had a shaking out period with the new government and so on and so forth.
But the government was already giving signs that it was it was moving away from some of its radical rhetoric.
And we didn't we didn't allow that to develop.
We didn't allow that to happen.
Well, they certainly, you know, under the the year long, year and a half long Morsi regime, their year long, I guess they didn't make any moves against Israel on the Rafah border crossing or anything like that.
I mean, I think they lightened up a trade of just medical resources and just a few things a little bit.
But they they made themselves clear that don't worry about us, Israel.
We're not going back on Camp David or our, you know, our deep states relationship with yours.
But that's still one good enough.
Yeah, that's right.
In fact, they were very careful not to go too far on the issue of the relationship with Israel and the relationship with the Palestinians.
They did not sort of throw open the borders and and rush in with, you know, what Israel is always kind of claiming weapons and that kind of thing.
Nothing like that happened.
But the fact was that, you know, they bearing what I guess they perceived as being on the side of caution.
The Israelis and the Americans felt that this Muslim Brotherhood in the presence was was dangerous and and they had not demonstrated that they were dangerous.
But again, this is one of the one of the many misjudgments that the United States has gotten sucked into in the Middle East.
You know, even at the time, I was joking that surely Zawahiri is going to be putting out a podcast saying, see, I told you so.
And then it was only this year, Phil, that I actually found out that he did in the summer of 2013.
After the coup, he put out a podcast saying, see, is exactly what I told you the Americans would do.
If if you participate in democracy and you actually win, they'll cancel it on you.
You're damn fools.
You should have been suicide bombers like me and my guys all along.
Yeah.
And of course, the the the the preceding event that was very similar to this was how they canceled the elections to the Palestinians that brought Hamas into power and in Gaza.
And indeed, they had a majority overall among the Palestinians.
But of course, we canceled we and the Israelis canceled that election, too.
So it just shows that that essentially there is a great deal of hypocrisy.
And I'm very being very nice using that word because it goes beyond hypocrisy in terms of how the United States sees its role in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world.
And, you know, it it doesn't take a genius among the people who live in these countries to realize just just what we're doing and how stupid and how bad it is.
And this is this is I know people wonder why our foreign policy is as screwed up as it is.
Well, you know, the answer is pretty simple, actually.
All right.
Well, it's Phil Giraldi's, a former CIA officer.
Here he is writing in The New York Times for crying out loud.
America's establishment has embraced deep states.
And when we get back from this break, we're going to talk about our deep state's embrace of the Turkish deep state and the evolving nature of that relationship such as it is.
And the war in Syria.
And then we got to get to this other great article.
What Obama should have told Benjamin Netanyahu.
This one is at UNS dot com.
We'll be right back after this with Phil Giraldi.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Phil Giraldi.
America's establishment, our deep state has embraced deep states.
That's Phil Giraldi's article in The New York Times.
In The New York Times.
And now.
So let's talk a little bit about America's relationship with Turkey here, because.
Well, I guess the way I understand it is the American military and intelligence agencies are very tight with Turkey's Kamala's elitist military and national intelligence services that date back to, you know, the formation of the Turkish state and all that.
But I guess I'm not so certain of their relationship with Erdogan, the elected president and and the leader of a, I believe, a decisive majority in their parliament now.
Although they sure do seem to agree with him about backing Al-Qaeda in Syria all these years.
So I guess I don't know how bad the split really is, Phil, but what do you think?
Well, on the side of the Turks, I mean, Erdogan needs to legitimize what he's been doing militarily, which is mostly, in fact, overwhelmingly attacking the Kurds and not attacking ISIS and not attacking Al-Qaeda.
And so he needs to legitimize that by being part of this NATO effort.
So that's his motive for being in it.
And the United States basically needs Turkey for other reasons, like, for example, to be able to run bombing raids from the Incirlik Air Base, which is in southern Turkey.
And also for reasons of intelligence and stuff like that, the Turks have better sources in terms of what's going on than we do.
So there is a there is a certain connection.
But at the same time, Erdogan is playing his own game.
He's got he he has replaced a lot of the generals and senior officers in the military because he wants his own men there.
And the military's ability to kind of go against the president and have a an independent relationship with the United States has been much eroded.
So it's kind of a funny situation there.
Certainly, I wouldn't trust Erdogan at all.
He's basically not interested in in defeating ISIS.
And he's more interested in getting rid of Assad for various reasons and and keeping the Kurds from uniting in any way in Syria, Iran and in southern Turkey.
Well, so that's not too much different than the American government's pretended interest here anyway.
Right.
Not attacking the Islamic State, not attacking al-Qaeda, getting rid of Assad.
Yeah, I think that's exactly true to a certain extent.
They have a they have a community of interest in terms of getting rid of Assad, which I've never quite understood for either one of them.
The Turkey is probably right in terms of its fear of development of a Kurdish state if the whole situation in their region were to go under.
But at the same time, the Assad was kind of a guarantor that that would not happen.
And Assad has also been a guarantor that Syria would remain a stable entity without becoming a home for terrorists.
You know, the United States, for for odd reasons, I think the usual liberal type reasons, you know, responsibility to protect and all that kind of thing.
They went a little bit crazy on that, just as they did with Gaddafi.
And this leads to unfortunate consequences.
Well, they seem to be somewhat backing down from that now and saying, well, OK, we got to get rid of Assad.
But we don't want to abolish the entire state of Syria and repeat that part of the Iraq disaster, at least that kind of thing.
But I mean, then again, their bluff has been called by the Russians at this point.
So what are the Turks or the Americans think that they're going to do?
How much money weapons can they give to al-Qaeda to fight against a Russian backed and outright Russian backed Syrian army?
Well, I think I think the reality is that it has come home to them.
Unless the Turks are willing to intervene massively on the ground, they're not going to change the status quo in Syria.
And they're not willing to do that.
The popular opinion in Turkey is strongly against it.
And they were and Turkish politicians recognize this would be a very bad step.
Now, the United States has also backed off from removing Assad in the talks that are going on in Vienna.
Removing Assad now really doesn't have a timetable.
So it's it's kind of a back off from there.
So this whole exercise and what we've been doing in Syria has turned out to be a complete waste of time, money and lives.
And there is no other way to look at it.
So now it sounds like kind of the context of what you're saying is the Americans and the Turks agree on all these things.
But the Americans are kind of worried about the independence of Erdogan anyway.
Yeah, yeah.
I would say that the Americans don't trust him at all.
And they basically don't trust him because they realize that he's using the war against Assad and against ISIS in particular as a cover for the other things that he's getting up to.
Plus, there's a long history of Erdogan supporting ISIS with weapons and allowing them to go into Turkey.
And when I was in Istanbul last summer, there were ISIS people, not exactly all over the place, but they were around and they were raising money and they were using Istanbul as an R&R point for people who were injured or who are being trained and that kind of thing.
This has been going on for quite a while.
And now, so if Obama's embedding special forces with the YPG and apparently with the Army of Conquest, Islamic Front, Arar Al-Sham, Al-Qaeda alliance in there somewhere, the mythical moderate somewhere next standing next to them or something, then it sounds to me and I know this is oversimplified or whatever, Phil, but it sounds like they're putting Americans at risk of getting bombed by our allies, the Turks, if they embed them with the YPG Kurdish group.against the Islamic State and they're risking getting our guys bombed by the Russians when they embed them with the mythical moderate Al-Qaeda guys against Assad.
So, and it doesn't seem like they can do much good in either case as far as what their stated missions are.
They look like they're just tripwires to me, but I don't know.
Is that they're going to have arrangements with the Turks and the Russians to make sure?
Yeah, I think they probably have developed relationships with corresponding officers on the other side to keep that from happening.
But you're right.
I mean, there still is a huge risk.
I mean, these bombing raids are not that accurate and there's a huge risk that Americans are going to get killed in this kind of thing.
And it's the whole thing is kind of crazy.
I think that they're envisioning these 60 or how many they're talking today about sending more people as forward spotters to make our bombings more accurate.
I think that's part of what the agenda is.
But the fact is this whole exercise is doomed to fail.
There is no realistic way to think that this makes any sense.
Yeah.
I mean, they can keep the Islamic State out of Kurdistan, but they're not going to empower the Kurds.
They can't.
There's not enough of them anyway.
They don't have the manpower, the firepower to go and quote unquote liberate Iraqi and Sunni Iraq and Syrian Sunni stand there from the Islamic State.
And the reaction among the people, they'd just be driving them right into the Islamic State's arms anyway for being the other in the first place.
They might as well be Americans.
Yeah.
Our ability to influence these situations is nil.
I mean, look at the situation in Iraq.
How long have they been trying to recapture Ramadi with U.S. advisers and U.S. support and everything like that?
You know, it's just it's just somebody needs a real reality check.
Somebody should go into the White House and grab that guy that pretends to be U.S. president and shake him around a little bit, say, you know, this.
Come on.
This is this makes no sense from a U.S. perspective.
And all you're going to do is kill more people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mitchell Prothero is reporting yesterday in McClatchy newspapers that Marine Force recon have been there fighting in Fallujah for a while now.
And that's why they're doing better than the forces in Ramadi.
Yeah.
So, yeah, no surprise there.
OK, now, man, we're almost out of time, but I like your daydream here about being the president and telling Netanyahu off.
It's at UNS.com.
What Obama should have told Bibi.
Go ahead.
Well, basically, he should have told Bibi to take a hike.
I mean, you know, this whole visit by Bibi was completely unacceptable.
This guy has has interfered in our politics.
He's abused the president.
Personally, he's he's he's made fun of our senior government officials.
He basically has exploited a fifth column in the United States to attack our institutions.
This guy now wants five billion dollars a year and will probably get most of that.
So I basically wrote a funny I think a funny little sketch saying what Obama should have told Bibi, which was basically, you know, get the hell out of here.
Yeah.
I like that.
Now, five billion dollars.
And, you know, this is the thing of it, too.
They announced, I guess he gets on the plane, the plane takes off and then they put out that they're going to legalize 20,000 new settlements on the West Bank.
Phil.
Yeah, that's just a smack Obama in the face as he's bowing down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Obama, Obama, you know, has nothing to say to this.
I mean, there's nothing he knows that he basically has to put up with.
And I was most offended by Obama blaming the current violence in in Palestine and Israel on the Palestinians.
I mean, it's like, OK, this is a kind of a complex situation going on.
But blaming it on the Palestinians is just such bullshit.
And yet our president, who should know better and does know better, comes out with it.
Yeah.
I saw a thing the other day.
Somebody sent me a Twitter argument.
He was in.
Well, hey, maybe they wouldn't be occupied if they would stop stabbing the Israelis, you know, getting cause and effect all backwards.
And by the way, I screwed up my correction here.
It's twenty two hundred new settlement units that they announced.
I think I said twenty thousand.
It was two thousand.
But still.
Yeah.
Twenty two hundred.
The effect of the smack in the president's face and for that matter, the absurd Americans who support Israel anyway in Netanyahu's words.
There is still more or less the same velocity, I think.
Yeah.
In my piece, I also cite Ron Louder, who's head of the what the World Jewish Congress, who wrote an open letter to the president before the meeting with Netanyahu saying describing Netanyahu as a great statesman and someone who is intelligent and far looking and everything like that.
And of course, that I my rejoinder to it was, yeah, he's also clinically insane.
Yeah.
Which, you know, that was what Uri Avnery was was saying.
And I think Uri Avnery in his piece a couple of articles ago was saying that, yeah, no, really.
I mean, there are educated people who think he's got a real screw loose and not just because they're offended about what he said, but his thought patterns as revealed by the things he said, you know.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
He's certainly a crank, Phil.
I'll settle for that.
Yeah.
Well, he's our crank, unfortunately.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're his anyway.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much for coming back on the show.
Appreciate it as always.
OK, Scott.
All right.
All right.
So that's Phil Giraldi.
He's at UNS.com, UNZ, UNS.com.
That's what Obama should have told BB.
And then his other one is in The New York Times.
We ran on Antiwar.com the other day.
America's establishment has embraced deep states.
Right back after this.
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